Sunday Times names and shames cyclists racking up miles on Strava

I once worked on a small project in East London to encourage Muslim women to cycle. It was actually more to do with class and deprivation as these are two of the biggest impediments to cycling in London. We received bikes from charities but also a tiny £500 grant from an EU fund and another £500 from a TfL fund. 

I often thought how the ignorant press would go apoplectic with manufactured rage if they knew the equation we were working with i.e

bicycle + Muslim + woman + EU = we want our country back (x 10) 

If you look at the full page spread of The Times and zoom in on the left on the facing page to that MAMIL article, there's a small column of news snippets. One of them is a paragraph about a hit & run driver who killed a female horse rider and her horse.

Presumably such an essential journey that he/she fled the scene immediately to get to their key worker job... 

No outrage. No tweets demanding that drivers (or horse riders) stay home. Bet the driver won't be "named and shamed".

But oh yeah, a cyclist rode 100 miles: HATE NOW, click here to register your hate! Post bile in our comments section here!

Good lord!  You mean you think there might be some double standards at play, here?

The fear that the government will clamp down on any form of outdoor physical exercise is the reason why I've not been going out for longer than 60-70 minutes after I heard Gove suggest a time if 60 minutes for a bike ride. In the current climate cyclists should take the opportunity to do shorter higher intensity, better quality rides rather than +2hr slogs.

Increasingly I agree with this point of view. Nothing to do with the fact that I, and everyone else, is safer if I ride off into the middle of nowhere and see almost no one. But the rules / guidelines have not been framed with cyclists in mind - they are for people who would do almost anything to avoid exercise but want an excuse to leave the house.

If we cyclists are seen to be doing something different that allows us more freedom, others may think that as we are "flouting" what seem to be rules, then they might as well - hence park and beach gatherings, house parties, going to one's holiday home what one has in Fife etc.

So although I've already done some normal length rides during lockdown, I have switched to shorter, more intense but frankly duller routes that I'm going to have to do more often. At least sunset is later and I might get out after work.

Like so many other things, this is bad science on a personal level but probably better in the aggregate population of blockheads.

Well, it isn't North Yorkshire, but it would appear the PCC from that area was right; there are villages really worried about cyclists.

Someone should put a sign up on the village border " villagers do not pass this sign: keep your viruses in your own village. Stay away from the town".

Those unhygienic cyclists, with virus in their pants...

Ignorance is bliss. If they only knew the truth - cyclists don't wear them!

If someone could actually try to express the spirit of the rules, maybe we could try to work out how to be seen to be following them. Unfortunately, the government seems to be either unwilling to or incapable of doing so.

It's not that they have the wrong strategy, it's that they, just like the Trump administration, don't seem to have _any_ strategy at all. Since the start it's been very clear they have no clue what they are doing. It's been a farce.

At least the Americans have people with some power at the level of individual states and cities who can partially make up for the lack of ideas at the top.

When there's no clear direction or plan coming from the top, people are going to turn on each other in fear and confusion. So hardly surprising velociphobia is part of it.

That's it, blame the government. There isn't a country in the world with a grip on this. It is, you don't need to be told, an unprecedented situation. Nobody knows or has experience on what to, they simply have no experience.

I'm afraid your assertions are not correct.

The protocols for viral pandemics were pretty much established after SARS.

Asia, by and large, has been extremely effective in combating C-19.

Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore all had their first confirmed cases before Europe but acted early and fast.  Consequently, they have all have deaths in single digits.

Test, trace, quarantine - and wear a mask to hinder passing anything on.

The West didn't follow the protocols and has paid dearly.

However, it is a myth to say we didn't know  how to address the danger.

biker phil wrote:

That's it, blame the government. There isn't a country in the world with a grip on this. It is, you don't need to be told, an unprecedented situation. Nobody knows or has experience on what to, they simply have no experience.

Not true. There are countries where their strategy has worked better than in the UK. Those governments genuinely listened to medical experts, they didn't sit around for 2 months, didn't propose 'herd immunity' as a valid approach, they didn't make vague noises about PPE while doing nothing then make accusations about NHS staff wasting it... so yes, I'm saying that our government, which we already have seen is run by people with little or no conscience, has a great number of very serious questions they have not answered. This is partly because parliament is paused and most of the MSM is happy to give them an easy ride.

https://bylinetimes.com/2020/04/11/a-national-scandal-a-timeline-of-the-...

This is 43 minutes well spent IMHO if you can handle listening to proper experts - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05-jbrHRmrs

Alternatively you can shove you head in the sand and shout "Bloody cyclists!"

Except Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea and Japan have all done a heck of a lot better than we have. Australia and New Zealand possibly also. We seem to be set to do worse than even most of the rest of Europe. In deaths-per-capita we are only behind Italy and Spain (would be ahead of France if we counted care-home deaths as they do), and we could yet overtake them all, unless Trump manages to take the US to the top spot.

It was clear this was coming back in late January, but the government did nothing till well into March. They didn't stock up on PPE equipment for the medical workers, didn't look into how to try to keep the economy alive, didn't get more ventilators, didn't come up with a real plan, didn't learn from what East Asian countries were doing (ignored the possibility that simple masks can help), and just sat on their arses while people bought the infection in (mostly from Italy). They seem incapable of scaling up testing, or even of coming up with any ideas for making the 'lock down' fairer in its impact.

They just hold these pointless briefings that are like some surreal comedy, where it takes a Q&A format, but the A's don't in any way relate to the Q's. The best that could be said for them is they just manage to stop short of being as much of a car-crash as Trump's efforts.

Even the US under the orange clown is doing much better than us with testing rates, largely thanks to the second tier of government over there.

They started off going with that cockamanie 'herd immunity' plan, which every expert in the world thought was crazy. Before suddenly changing tack again and since then they seem to have been blundering around with no direction at all.

Yes, I 'blame the government' - it's their _job_ to organise the response to this. Are you seriously suggesting the government has no responsibility for dealing with a collective disaster like a pandemic? What the hell are they for then?

Sure, so then there is a legitimate role for the media - to dispel such misguided perception precisely so that people can make the best of these straightened times without incurring rancour built on fear and ignorance. But instead they do the very opposite and stoke the fires.

But how does anyone know how long you have been out?
As someone posted earlier, a lot of it is simply jealousy because cyclists can carry in as normal whereas people can't go to the gym.

Completely agree with that last bit, although it goes without saying that the newspapers are tending simply to stoke bad feeling towards cyclists in general, and to tar all of us with the same brush, just out of mean-spirited prejudice. A lot of people are making a lot of sacrifices at this time, often involving being barred from doing things where, so long as sufficiently few people do those activities at any given time, any particular person doing that activity is quite unlikely to create problems with regards to spreading the virus etc. (consider e.g. fishing) - and aspects of the reasoning wheeled out to justify being able to go for long rides commonly generalise to those cases too. Many noncyclists are therefore inevitably going to hear about cyclists going for day-long rides, traveling through places that would otherwise have fewer people passing through them etc., and feel resentment. Maybe the law doesn't explicitly block people from riding long distances, and for long stretches of time, but the fact that one is legally permitted to do something doesn't mean that one should do it: many forms of tax evasion underline that point pretty firmly.

demondig wrote:

Many noncyclists are therefore inevitably going to hear about cyclists going for day-long rides, traveling through places that would otherwise have fewer people passing through them etc., and feel resentment.

Get real! Most riders are not doing day-long rides.

With the quieter roads the people writing nasty articles (and bitching on cycling websites) could easily go for rides themselves instead of bashing cyclists.

Where are the nasty articles by people who don't have large gardens - or those who don't have any garden at all - about people with significant property who can walk some distance, have barbeques and experience other outdoor pleasures within their own grounds due to their good fortune? The people in households without cars don't get to vent in The Sunday Times about the multi-dimensional harm caused by traffic outside their door.

And let's get this in perspective. The proportion of Strava users - itself a subset of all people who cycle - doing long rides is rather small, yet the style of bitchy, blame-game journalism means that all cyclists are tarred with that brush. One cyclist I know is riding to town, doing a shift of Deliveroo-type jobs and riding home.

Incidentally, the 1,250 km strave challenge mentioned above amounts to 41.6 km (26 miles) per day. That's certainly less than 2 hours of riding for most of us.

Sure, I agree with all that. Some people are heading out for lots of long rides, though - my own Strava feed tells me that - and it's a fair question how far there are moral considerations bearing on whether they should be doing so, even while the letter of the law does perhaps permit the activities, and even though most cyclists aren't spending anything like the day in the saddle. The newpaper articles don't address these issues in any sort of reasonable manner, needless to say - they tend just to be taking pot-shots at cyclists - but they are interesting questions nonetheless.